11 An Example of Devotion
I urge upon you communion with Christ a growing communion.
There are curtains to be drawn aside in Christ that we never saw, and new
foldings of love in him. I despair that I shall ever win to the far end of
that love, there are so many plies in it. Therefore dig deep, and sweat and
labor and take pains for him, and set by as much time in the day for him as
you can. We will be won in the labor. -- Samuel Rutherford
God has now, and has had, many of these devoted, prayerful preachers -- men
in whose lives prayer has been a mighty, controlling, conspicuous force. The
world has felt their power, God has felt and honored their power, God's cause
has moved mightily and swiftly by their prayers, holiness has shone out in their
characters with a divine effulgence.
God found one of the men he was looking for in David Brainerd, whose work and
name have gone into history. He was no ordinary man, but was capable of shining
in any company, the peer of the wise and gifted ones, eminently suited to fill
the most attractive pulpits and to labor among the most refined and the
cultured, who were so anxious to secure him for their pastor. President Edwards
bears testimony that he was "a young man of distingushed talents, had
extraordinary knowledge of men and things, had rare conversational powers,
excelled in his knowledge of theology, and was truly, for one so young, an
extraordinary divine, and especially in all matters relating to experimental
religion. I never knew his equal of his age and standing for clear and accurate
notions of the nature and essence of true religion. His manner in prayer was
almost inimitable, such as I have very rarely known equaled. His learning was
very considerable, and he had extraordinary gifts for the pulpit."
No sublimer story has been recorded in earthly annals than that of David
Brainerd; no miracle attests with diviner force the truth of Christianity than
the life and work of such a man. Alone in the savage wilds of America,
struggling day and night with a mortal disease, unschooled in the care of souls,
having access to the Indians for a large portion of time only through the
bungling medium of a pagan interpreter, with the Word of God in his heart and in
his hand, his soul fired with the divine flame, a place and time to pour out his
soul to God in prayer, he fully established the worship of God and secured all
its gracious results. The Indians were changed with a great change from the
lowest besotments of an ignorant and debased heathenism to pure, devout,
intelligent Christians; all vice reformed, the external duties of Christianity
at once embraced and acted on; family prayer set up; the Sabbath instituted and
religiously observed; the internal graces of religion exhibited with growing
sweetness and strength. The solution of these results is found in David Brainerd
himself, not in the conditions or accidents but in the man Brainerd. He was
God's man, for God first and last and all the time. God could flow unhindered
through him. The omnipotence of grace was neither arrested nor straightened by
the conditions of his heart; the whole channel was broadened and cleaned out for
God's fullest and most powerful passage, so that God with all his mighty forces
could come down on the hopeless, savage wilderness, and transform it into his
blooming and fruitful garden; for nothing is too hard for God to do if he can
get the right kind of a man to do it with.
Brainerd lived the life of holiness and prayer. His diary is full and
monotonous with the record of his seasons of fasting, meditation, and
retirement. The time he spent in private prayer amounted to many hours daily.
"When I return home," he said, "and give myself to meditation, prayer, and
fasting, my soul longs for mortification, self-denial, humility, and divorcement
from all things of the world." "I have nothing to do," he said, "with earth but
only to labor in it honestly for God. I do not desire to live one minute for
anything which earth can afford." After this high order did he pray: "Feeling
somewhat of the sweetness of communion with God and the constraining force of
his love, and how admirably it captivates the soul and makes all the desires and
affections to center in God, I set apart this day for secret fasting and prayer,
to entreat God to direct and bless me with regard to the great work which I have
in view of preaching the gospel, and that the Lord would return to me and show
me the light of his countenance. I had little life and power in the forenoon.
Near the middle of the afternoon God enabled me to wrestle ardently in
intercession for my absent friends, but just at night the Lord visited me
marvelously in prayer. I think my soul was never in such agony before. I felt no
restraint, for the treasures of divine grace were opened to me. I wrestled for
absent friends, for the ingathering of souls, for multitudes of poor souls, and
for many that I thought were the children of God, personally, in many distant
places. I was in such agony from sun half an hour high till near dark that I was
all over wet with sweat, but yet it seemed to me I had done nothing. O, my dear
Saviour did sweat blood for poor souls! I longed for more compassion toward
them. I felt still in a sweet frame, under a sense of divine love and grace, and
went to bed in such a frame, with my heart set on God." It was prayer which gave
to his life and ministry their marvelous power.
The men of mighty prayer are men of spiritual might. Prayers never die.
Brainerd's whole life was a life of prayer. By day and by night he prayed.
Before preaching and after preaching he prayed. Riding through the interminable
solitudes of the forests he prayed. On his bed of straw he prayed. Retiring to
the dense and lonely forests, he prayed. Hour by hour, day after day, early morn
and late at night, he was praying and fasting, pouring out his soul,
interceding, communing with God. He was with God mightily in prayer, and God was
with him mightily, and by it he being dead yet speaketh and worketh, and will
speak and work till the end comes, and among the to glorious ones of that
glorious day he will be with the first.
Jonathan Edwards says of him: "His life shows the right way to success in the
works of the ministry. He sought it as the soldier seeks victory in a siege or
battle; or as a man that runs a race for a great prize. Animated with love to
Christ and souls, how did he labor? Always fervently. Not only in word and
doctrine, in public and in private, but in prayers by day and night, wrestling
with God in secret and travailing in birth with unutterable groans and agonies,
until Christ was formed in the hearts of the people to whom he was sent. Like a
true son of Jacob, he persevered in wrestling through all the darkness of the
night, until the breaking of the day!"
